Dear Serial Readers,
I've noticed that since we've moved to the once-a-week installment, there have been fewer comments from out there in the bloggerland. Please don't feel obliged to post a long comment, but let us know we have a wider reading community than three!
For me, this number generated some suspense around marriage plotting. Since readers of the original installment would've encountered the two illustrations before the text of the chapters, they would've known from that second one, "Mr Dombey introduces his daughter Florence," that Florence was not going to return to the "quiet" or "dull" home she anticipates. Of course, they would've surmised as much from the previous chapters in Leamington where Edith tells her mother that Dombey "has bought me" (417).
That entire passage, with Edith telling her mother, "You gave birth to a woman" and comparing the marriage market to the slave market, really struck me. Edith lives up to her promise as an increasingly fascinating character, both her resigned indifference (although her sharpness and wit undercut this) and her surprising compassion toward her almost- stepdaughter Florence.
Since I'm far away from that original readership, I can't help comparing Edith to two (future) Dickens characters: Lady Dedlock (Bleak House, 1852-3) and Louisa Gradgrind (Hard Times, 1854). Whether Edith too has some powerful secret in her past to give definition to her seeming indifference, or just her first arranged marriage to an older man who died prematurely (ie, for Edith, before obtaining his inheritance), remains to be seen. We know she's lost a child, although the circumstances are very different from Lady Dedlock's secret. In the Leamington scenes with that predatory shark Carker fixing his penetrating eye on Edith, I kept thinking of Tulkinghorn watching Lady Dedlock. Even the tour of Warwick Castle seemed to anticipate the descriptions of Chesney Wold, another Victorian Gothic setting, in the later novel. Edith's speech to her mother about her lost childhood reminded me of Louisa's to her father where she bemoans the Gradgrindian approach to children's training where "facts" supplants "fancy" and "heart."
In many ways this episode, like the others, emphasizes a tension between past (see Mrs. S's nostalgia for "those darling byegone times" in ch 27) and modern times or modes of living, with the "alterations" of the "quiet home" in this last chapter 28 heralding an anxious updating and change for this household. What is in store for "Dreaming Florence" now? How will Carker manipulate information (about Walter) and the new Dombey marriage to his advantage? And how will Edith respond, both to Carker and to Florence? Although the chapter titles (I think) were added for the volume publication, not the original part-issue numbers, chapter 26's "Shadows of the Past and Future" captures the temporal disorientations and struggles of the novel.
There are two other aspects of this number that I was curious about, and wonder if any of you serial readers have thoughts about. First, the treatment of Major B's "Native" (also appearing in the first illustration), subjected to ridiculous abuse from his master. Is this supposed to be comical, and in what way? How does the Major's treatment of the nameless "Native" echo other kinds of ruthless behaviors in the novel? Edith does bring up the analogy between marriage and slave markets. And finally, that description of Mrs Skewton aka Cleopatra undressing for the night ( ch 27, 416) with the help of her maid who has the "touch of Death." Here "the painted object" becomes an ancient relic of her former self, almost a cadaver. What is this passage suggesting about old age and trying to disguise agedness?
For next time: number ten (halfway point!), chaps 29-31 for July 1847.
2 comments:
I'm very interested in the way this one ends. Poor Florence is, I think, set up for a major shock. And the surprising reaction to her father's news -- the totally genuine happiness -- only makes this more poignant. Especially given Mr. Dombey's icy demeanor, it's difficult to watch Florence's love go unrewarded for so long. But it's also interesting to see Edith, who could have been nothing more than the evil stepmother of fairy tales (which, after all, the narrator brings up so frequently). There's some surprising depth to her character that keeps us interested in what will happen next.
And then there's Major Bagstock and Mr. Carker, both of whom are growing ever more sinister ... they'd certainly be enough to keep me reading, even if Edith, Florence, and Mr. Dombey weren't so intriguing.
Once again, I really enjoyed this installment, particularly once Edith’s complex character became the focus of attention. Dickens’s deployment of the game metaphor (with Carker as the expert gamer and J.B. and Cleopatra as enthusiastic players) got me thinking about the different modes of communication between the characters. Games are often about separating appearance and reality—learning how to bluff effectively—and this idea seems to translate easily to the social discourse of Leamington. Repeatedly, verbal communication is represented as so artificial as to be disconnected from reality and virtually meaningless (even purposefully misleading). Dombey and Edith both allow their friends to write "what you please" (305) and "what you will" (313) to express their feelings for the other, suggesting the hollowness of words (and the hollowness of their feelings). Edith emphasizes the artificiality of verbal communication more directly when she responds to her mother, "it is surely not worth while, Mama...to observe these forms of speech. We are quite alone. We know each other" (313). In the world of “society,” words are just part of an elaborate game; they are not an avenue towards knowledge. In contrast, non-verbal communication emerges as an alternative system that yields useful knowledge. The exchange of eye contact between Edith and Carker in chapter 27 (p. 323 and 329 in my copy) yield insights that the characters' contemporaneous verbal conversations seem to mask. Looks rather than words seem to be the key to understanding characters like Edith. Interestingly this seems not to be the case for the "natural" Florence. Unlike the bantering Cleopatra or J.S., she is distressed by verbal exchanges that seem false (for example when Sir Barnet asks her to present his "best compliments to your dear Papa" (p. 339)). In addition, Florence’s verbal communications at the end of the installment ("Oh, Papa, may you be happy!) correspond with her non-verbal actions of weeping on Edith's bosom.
This contrast between unified word/action and disparate word/action seems to set Edith and Florence up as foils. The dramatic ending of the installment, however, suggests how close they are (as two women in desperate need of genuine love) despite their differences in artificiality and guilelessness. I was touched by the unusual sense of hope at the ending of this installment, as each character seems to see the other as a potential guide. Could this be a turning point in the novel in terms of tone as well as plot?
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